Vase of Flowers - feedback please

Just some flowers at home.

Trying to work on my composition, shot it in JPEG + RAW so i will include the camera version and my tweeked version
I tried a preset (vivid) to try and make the colours pop a bit more and make the flowers stand out.

Also trying to work on my depth of field to try and isolate the flowers

Re: Vase of Flowers - feedback please

Mike,

You intended these to be full sized, but the link takes me to an image that is too tiny to evaluate.

Why bother with two versions? Edit it to your liking and then post that one. Personally, I never bother with JPEGs unless I just want a snapshot and don't care about details. The raw file is the one that will give you the most control over processing.

Re: Vase of Flowers - feedback please

Hi Mike,
Welcome to CiC and congratulation on sorting out the up-load; many people have the same issue at first.

I have a few comments that I hope will give you something to consider, but as always it's your picture so it's how you feel about it that matters.
Anyhow, it appears to me the bottom central leaf is the point most in focus, with the rest of the flowers looking a bit soft. I know you were trying to use DOF to seperate the flowers from the background, but I feel the background is still too distracting. Perhaps a coloured sheet or piece of card placed behind the flowers would have given you better isolation. If this was something you wanted to explore, I would suggest you leave a gap of a few feet between the subject and the background sheet / card.

Lastly I personally would have re-arranged the floowers in the vase, I'm sure they look lovely, but from the angle the picture was taken the yellow/golden flowers should be moved into a position which would compliment the Deep Royal blue flowers already at the front.

All the above are just my opinions and no offence will be taken if you feel some or all of my comments are only fit for the bin.